


patience gets us nowhere fast

by butterflyswimmer



Category: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni | Higurashi When They Cry
Genre: Comfort, Crushes, Developing Relationship, F/F, Falling In Love, Female Characters, Female Relationships, Femslash, Firsts, Flirting, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Introspection, Love, Mutual Pining, Pining, Romance, Sexual Content, gay pining gay pining and more gay pining, rena pov, those tags mean the same thing as far as i'm concerned, where are the miirena fans. where are they. i'm shouting into the void
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterflyswimmer/pseuds/butterflyswimmer
Summary: You have loved her since before you knew her.





	patience gets us nowhere fast

**Author's Note:**

> contains non-explicit sexual content.

_i._

The unspoken awkwardness of lying so their bodies don’t touch, feeling one another’s breath on their faces across the pillows. She hopes she doesn’t seem as completely awkward as she feels, she hopes she emanates a confidence invisible, somehow, even to her. She reminds herself that this is her best friend, her best friend, as if it will quench the dancing blaze in her stomach rather than fan it. She doesn’t understand how everything can be so different here, in the dark, so close and so alone—her warmth seems to chase away the possibility of sadness, now or ever. There’s something inexplicable shared in gazes that flicker away from one another and then back, voices hushed, hair loose and messy, clothes soft and worn—her room smelt somehow of home. They share the things that they don’t yet know about one another, an exercise in intimacy that frightens away the ghosts at her back—it’s the first time she wants to be bare. She wants to know everything, she wants to be known. Six minutes after they’ve said goodnight and turned over, six minutes of feeling the jut of her shoulder blade and her hip against her back, Mion turns again, pulls her in by the waist, hugs her with a certainty she’s never known. It’s a certainty that she’s sure says _friendship_. A line she hadn’t realised she’d been looking for, a rule made to be broken.  
  


_ii._

She lives for the minutes they spend before sleep, heads close, whispering about everything. At night, with her hair down, she looks like how she’d imagined the princesses in the fairytales she’d read growing up.

A hand brushes her arm under the sheets, her chest aches. She laughs that laugh, breathless and sweet. Her greed eats at her from her lungs out, every breath painful with want.

“Rena?” She loves hearing her name on her lips. She had been the first one ever to use it—she wondered if that was what had made it right. She waits to see if she’ll say it again. “I’m glad I met you.” Her eyes shine in the dark. Fingers meet hers—this time, she means it. They intertwine. She forces herself to breathe, words measured.

“Yeah. Me too.”  
  


_iii._

A girl her age, by the window at the back of the classroom. A smile like daylight after a dream.

The way she would put her hair up, ribbon between her lips, fingers pulling together a messy ponytail.

Palm cupping her cheek, gaze intent and warm—then, the sun spilling into view as she leant back in her chair, so her profile was edged with gold.

The swish of her skirt as she turned to say goodbye, promising to see her tomorrow. Words she would think about for too long, smiling into her pillow.

Her calls late at night, strangely intimate—taking the handset up to her room, the only light coming from her lamp and the moon beyond the window. The way she would lie down as they spoke and imagine being next to her. The way she would close her eyes and listen to her voice in her ear until she began to fall asleep.  
  


_iv._

“Have you ever been in love?”

Her skin becomes warm as all her blood rushes to the centre of her being. Her heart thuds sorely. She laughs, bright and false. “Have you?”

She blushes, playing with her hair between her fingers, pouting. “That’s not fair. I asked you first.” She draws the covers up to her chin. Her voice is uncertain, quiet and unguarded. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Closing her eyes, she permits herself to be weak, if only for a moment, and pulls Mion close. A noise of surprise—a gasp mixed with a sound. She lets her head fall limp at the other girl’s shoulder. Then, in time, arms hold her, too. It’s because she knows she will get what she wants that she doesn’t permit herself this—

“You’ve never hugged me before.” Her voice is smiling.  
  


_v._

It’s horrible.

Feeling as though you’re using her, every time she takes your hand in hers on the walk home without a second thought. Sometimes you want to beg her not to be so kind. She doesn’t have to weigh up every smile, every second of every embrace—she can afford to love, the way you can’t. But you want to let yourself. She has made you in to a terrible liar.

It’s wonderful.

You have loved her since before you knew her. In the moments where you’re alone, you can almost believe there are no secrets between you. You can indulge in hope, sweet and dangerous. You can put reality off until morning.

Besides, with the way she looks at you, the way she touches you—you begin to question yourself. You’ve given up on finding where friendship ends and love begins. You have realised they run parallel.  
  


_vi._

“You never answered my question.” A finger draws lazy circles on her forearm. It’s somehow torture and heaven.

“What question?” Their foreheads are touching, and her eyes are closed. She cannot weather her gaze. Not now. She feels hair tickling her face, she doesn’t know whose. The curve of her waist in her palm is sweet victory after four minutes spent journeying there from her back. Mion shifts closer, their legs brush.

“Rena,” she breathes. “Look at me.”

When she opens her mouth to reply, she finds she can’t. She only swallows. The hand leaves her arm. She bites back a complaint, only to find the fingers at the hollow of her neck, as if ready to tease the words out of her. She speaks against her will, her voice weak. “I can’t.” And then, “please.”  
  


_vii._

Sometimes she wonders if the time they spend alone together is the stuff of her dreams—what was once fantasy now permitted in the liminal space of her bedroom on a spring night. She’ll wonder if there’s been a mistake, somewhere—and then will come Mion’s voice, playful, affectionate, bridging the gap between the classroom, the weekends in Okinomiya, the walk home, and here—fingers tangled in her hair, smiling against her skin, still not close enough.

“I love you, Rena.”

She winces.

“You’re my best friend.”

They hold one another and her body is so warm. Longing grips everything in her. It’s the times like this where she can’t forgive herself, for the things she thinks—

“You’re always so quiet when we spend time together like this.” A murmur in her ear. “I want to know what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t.” She’s surprised by her own voice, raw and stripped of pretense. The real her. Mion brushes aside her bangs to stroke her face, cupping her cheek.

“You still feel like you need to keep secrets from me?” The note of sadness in her voice makes her chest constrict. Her words are soft, private. “You know nothing will change how I feel about you? Nothing has until now, and nothing ever will.”

Pressing her face into the other girl, she feels the tears escape, cold against their body heat. Mion just holds her, always patient.  
  


_viii._

It's Mion, and so it starts out as a game.

At first, the kisses are tentative, lips at the corner of one another’s mouths, barely brushing—kisses that try to mean nothing, kisses that say _we can still pretend this was all an accident._ They melt all desire in her like sugar in water, then leave her wanting more.

Their movements are slow and lethargic as they learn what to do together, bodies forgetting themselves, relaxing into each other, stopping only to breathe, look at one another, giggle, carry on. _There’s nothing wrong about this_ , she thinks, over and over again, a mantra to relieve her of months of anxiety.  "I love you,” she mumbles one night, between kisses. “I love you, Mii-chan.”  
  


_ix._

On a night where the moon shines magnificently, with no prompting and no explanation, Mion looks into her eyes, as if to ask her whether she’s sure. “Yes,” she whispers, “yes, for so long.”

She turns and slips out of her clothes.

For a minute, Rena only stares at the charred black lines, the violent red, so out of place on her skin. The demon—her past, her future, her curse, her power. When she reaches out and touches her, she’s shivering.

“Are you sure,” she asks again, voice weak, the question never finishing itself.

She kisses the place between her shoulder blades before moving to her ear. “Trust me.”  
  


_x._

A million times she’s done this in her head, never once believing it could become reality. And so her fingers fumble over the buttons of her shirt, unsteady, waiting to wake up. And then Mion pulls her head close, whispers something, laughs into her ear—that laugh that mends everything.

Touching her leaves her drunk on desire. There’s something magical about it—the voice of her best friend, slightly breathless, just trembling. She wants more of that voice. She wants to do everything it will take to coax it out of her.

She traces every dip and blemish, every scar and muscle, following the contours of her body to the places that make her arch her back, curl her toes, dig her nails in, say her name. She loves the smell of her, the taste of her, the way she looks—feeling her come undone completely under her touch alone. Feeling all of their pain melt into moment after moment where there is nothing but love and pleasure.

Somehow more than any of this, there’s the way she tucks her head into the hollow of her neck at the end of it all, sweaty and spent, the tired kiss placed on her collarbone, the rise and fall of her chest, skin against skin. It is only in her arms that she finds these whole, all-encompassing sleeps—the ones that heal all that was and is to come. A momentary mirage of peace, a place to come back to if only you remember to look for it.  
  
  
_  
(i._

_A girl her age, by the window at the back of the classroom. A smile like daylight after a dream she’s already forgotten.)_

**Author's Note:**

> you can't spell writing without self-indulgent gay projection am i right
> 
> (title from the [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tikz_cSD2jU) by capital cities.)


End file.
